Linux From Scratch : The Beginning…

Hi Everyone,

If you don’t remember me, I’m Dave. Last time for the experiment I used SuSE, which I regretted. This time I decided to use Linux From Scratch like Jake, as I couldn’t think of another distribution that I haven’t used in some way or another before. Let me tell you… It’s been quite the experience so far.

The Initial Setup

Unlike Jake, I opted not to use the LFS Live CD, as I figured it would be much easier to start with a Debian Live CD. By the sounds of it, I made a good decision. I had network right out of the gate, which made it easy to copy and paste awful sed commands.

The initial part of the install was relatively painless for me. Well, except that one of the LFS mirrors had a version from 2007 listed as their latest stable build, setting me back about an hour. I followed the book, waited quite a while for some stuff to compile, and I was in my brand new … command-line. Ok, it it’s not very exciting at first, but I was jumping for joy when I ran the following command and got the result I did:

root [ ~ ]# ping google.ca
PING google.ca (74.125.226.82): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.125.226.82: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=32.967 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.226.82: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=33.127 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.226.82: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=40.045 ms

 

Series of Tubes

The internet was working! Keep reading if you want to hear what awful thing happened next…

Where did ‘as’ go!

My next step was to get sshd working so that I could once again copy and paste. Little did I know, my assembler and linker did not carry over to the built system. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but it did. I must have missed a “/@@@@@@@@” somewhere in sed.

The fix for this issue didn’t take too long. All I had to do was rebuild binutils. Fortunately, this didn’t end in pain. If you ever run into a situation where your command prompt is yelling at you that C cannot create executables, take a look in your config.log and make sure that binutils and properly built and installed.

Sshd did take a few minutes to install, but that was because I kept trying to install it to /user instead of /usr. It was getting a little bit late…

What’s Next?

Since this will be my primary machine for the next 2 months, I decided it might be a good idea to install X and a Window Manager. In my next post, coming soon, I will describe the hell I went through to install X. As I write this, QT and KDE are compiling. Once it’s done, so in about 3 weeks, I’ll post an update on the progress.



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